Roger Moore

Clooney? When he has a comical moment, he makes the most of it. His attempts at heartfelt epiphany left me cold.

It comes off, it plays and it entertains. And the impressive, high-end Sunrise Animation Studio production values — realistic landscapes, clever character designs and tje scale of a capital city under construction (Gibeah, pre-Jerusalem) — are just the icing on the cake.

Little Trouble Girls is a conventional girls’ coming-of-age tale whose clever twist is equating sexual awakening with spiritual awakening, at least in the eyes and ears of an impressionable teen.

Zhao, bouncing back from the Marvel “Eternals” paycheck picture/debacle, serves up a touching romance between a distracted young man of letters and a woman so attuned to nature she hunts with a pet hawk, knows the uses of every herb and tree and the incantations that go with their preparation and is thus labeled the “daughter of a witch.”

With this film, Tsou belatedly announces herself as “The Next Sean Baker,” a sure-handed director with an ear, an eye and empathy for the huddled masses whose story she tells.

Attempts at “suspense” in the heist itself are ineptly handled. The script and the leads strain to wring the “cute” out of this, but that’s in short supply.

The Protector gets pretty much everything wrong.

There are a few laughs and some chewy turns (Brolin, mainly) to sink our teeth into. But “Wake Up Dead Man,” for all its St. Paul Blinded on the Road to Damascus “case of pink-eye” zingers, doesn’t amuse enough to dazzle, and doesn’t get the best out of a cast that deserves better.

As current as these issues and this debate remains, a story meant to pass judgement after the dust settles just comes off as mediocre, murky, both-sidesing virtue signalling from a writer out of her depth.

For all its attempted ethereal touches, Train Dreams never settles on a track that delivers one.

Rental Family is an almost miraculously sensitive movie about the limits of such “services” in a culture where decorum, saving face, protecting feelings, apologies and shame are appreciated for their real value. And it’s about acting and the core of that “calling,” making connections with strangers while playing a part that entertains, flatters or fulfills them on some level.

I laughed at a few of the more audacious butcherings, but that was early on. The narrative settles into a slog in the middle acts and no pull-out-the-stops train ride finale could drag it out of the mud.

Stretching, stuffing and filling make this film play flatter, as if all the fun is gone. The jokes are few and far between, and they die of loneliness in the wait.

This is indie cinema with a point and a point of view, and Glidewell, Ferrell and the cast deserve to have this engrossing and worthhile drama be a career highlight that should lead to others.

Playdate is perfectly awful, glib in its violence, cavalier about “collateral damage” and packed with what regular family movie watchers might call “Hollywood parenting” — kids who curse, bully and have zero respect for sportsmanship and adults, especially parents.

What Ozon flirts with is the superior adaptability and endurance of those who can let the past be the past, and the costs of not getting over to those who won’t.

There’s no depth to the characters, especially Tee Yai, little that tells us how or what each is thinking or hoping. The shootouts are routine if excessive and the finale inevitable.

Mensore gets it right and tells a story validated by journalism and every trip through the region and everybody you know who lives there.

That four-handed screenplay gives us 85 minutes of movie, and “Zombieland/Venom” director Ruben Fleischer drags that out to nearly two hours. That underscores just how much this disposable piffle outstays its welcome.

The film’s pacing is stumbling and the longer it goes on, the less urgency we feel in that chase.

The clumsy arbitrariness of the plot, the “rules” of this world and the limits the story imposes which characters sometimes ignore undercut any “reality” we’re meant to buy into.

They’re just churning this junk out on a budget that guarantees it’ll sell, quality be damned.

Frankenstein is beautiful to look at and thoughtful enough to make one ponder its two hundred year old themes and warnings anew.

Caterpillar presents itself as a gay man’s documentary journey of self-discovery, when it’s really about body dysphoria/dysmorphai and faddish cosmetic surgery taken to its extreme.

The film’s great gift to this piece of much-filmed history is demythologizing Jackson, a figure the script and Shannon portray as well-intentioned, hard-nosed and out of his depth in attempting to try charismatic sociopaths that most of the world would rather had been rounded up and shot.

There’s no getting around the disquiet Ramsay goes for and achieves with this nightmarish primer on postpartum depression at its most extreme. But at some point, the shocks numb you in ways the tedium of the myopic, intimate story hasn’t.

From the moment the movie makers blow the “meet cute,” this “The Shop Around the Corner/You’ve Got Mail” ripoff doesn’t tickle, tantalize or titilate, even when the ladies of the shop engage in competitive tire-changing.

As the mayhem, six shooters and bad-acting go off all around him, Dorff stands above it all, reminding us that this might have been taken seriously instead of all this vamped bad makeup, acting and screenwriting ineptitude and goofing around by players who figure they’re better than this.

Farrell, Swinton, Chen and Ip do what they can with their characters. But it’s hard to decide if anyone here is just another demon or angel in Doyle’s fevered brain, or real.

Plemons and Stone, who has become the director’s Oscar-winning muse, are terrifyingly real. And the allegory of a civilization in crisis lured like lemmings off this or that cliff of lunacy lands hard.

Reichardt takes her time setting up this slow-motion trainwreck and keeps her cards close to her vest in terms of character details that underscore just how “wrong” this whole thing goes. She spares us the melodramatics and just lets things happen and the consequences be accepted in ways no conventional thriller would.

Auction is good, underhanded fun, and even the loose ends that Bonitzer leaves hanging — perhaps this had a longer cut at some point — leave one uncertain about how this high-stakes poker game will play out or who might upend the table with not-quite-all-their-cards on it for that final hand.

It isn’t all that much fun. The odd chuckle doesn’t atone for the scads of laughs that just don’t land in a story that spins its wheels on the snowy streets of NYC. Except when the crooks drive a Rivian.

About 70 minutes of this 92 minute comedy is a pretty good actress (Nascimento starred in “A Wolf at the Door”) cussing out the influencer, her “misogynistic idiot” boss, her best friend (Patricia Ramos) and on down the line.

The performances have an offhanded charm and street reality that sells this. And there are worse ways to spend your movie-going time that taking a walk on the not-so-wild side through Toronto’s colorful neighborhoods with the dreamers who long to escape them.

It’s a brooding performance in a brooding movie, not your conventional rags to riches triumph or Jeremy Allen White Sings The Boss biopic. But White and Cooper make it interesting and entertaining enough to invest in.

Director, writer and co-star Daniel Hendler‘s film is a mystery, a journey of personal growth and a quixotic quest to diagnose what constitutes “eccentric” behavior and what relatives and the courts might consider insane.

Anniversary may be, like its “movie of the moment” forebears, another shout into the void. But everybody involved — especially Lane, whose performance is another career highlight — can take heart in trying to sum up democracy’s collapse as seen through one, generally slow-to-alarm inside-the-beltway family’s disintegration. Yeah, it happened like this.

They assembled a cast worthy of a “Death on the Nile” variation set in a fjord. But director and co-writer Simon Stone, who did a fine job with Carey Mulligan’s “The Dig,” is utterly at sea in this genre.

When the surprises aren’t very surprising except in ways that betray the picture’s tone and every illogical thing we can’t help but notice gives away those surprises, the only conclusion is that this “Astronaut” doesn’t have the right stuff even if Mara does.

It’s a wonderful time capsule and a warm — with some reservations — remembrance of growing up in showbiz, the children of famous people who’d get stopped on the street, in the restaurant or wherever by strangers, even when the kids were the ones desperately wanting and needing their attention.

The performances are spot on. And all involved have made a marvelously melancholy “feel good” movie that ticks off so many Brit film boxes — eccentric characters, quaint and soggy setting, emotions kept under wraps and a charming, wistful story about moving on, being smart enough to realize the need for it and kind enough to help others manage it as well.

Both Black Phones are derivative . . . But the derivations Derrickson went for in the sequel are simply not as arresting or interesting.

The leads are engaging and some jokes land. But none of them cut deep because there’s little edge to any of this.

Romer covers a lot of ground in this sometimes touching and even inspiring documentary. About all she misses is Japan’s invitation to participate in the Little League World Series, and its early dominance and ongoing success there.

The star here is a version of every street stray you’ve seen in Central or South America, a big-eyed brown beauty named Amendoim, which is “Peanuts” in Portuguese. He romps through scenes, vocalizes on cue and turns on the charm after every apartment-trashing, food-stealing/scene stealing frolic.

The sad truth of the matter is that Disney took 15 years to make a sequel and never came up with a compelling story for that sequel to tell, and spent all that money without casting anybody who’d hold our interest dashing through all this red-neon nothingness for two hours.

It pairs up the graceful, athletic and best-in-comedic roles Channing Tatum and Kirsten Dunst, an earthy actress who easily summons up wary, wounded and beguiling with just a dimpled smile and a twinkle in her eye. Throw in the deadpan delight Lakeith Stanfield, June Temple who brings more to trashy-funny than any of her peers, Peter Dinklage at his most irritable and veteran Oz-villain Ben Mendelsohn — cast against type as a good-hearted pastor — and you’ve got yourself a winner.

Friends, acquaintances and fans still get choked up when the subject of the late Canadian comic wonder John Candy comes up.

Good Boy makes the humans all but superfluous as its star delivers some of the most realistic reactions to the unexplainable this time-worn genre has ever seen.

The cast is game but rather drab — even the villains.

Sitcom-veteran Lavin navigates the abrasive tactlessness of the archetype she’s playing with ease, even if the Yiddishisms feel forced and dated a generation older than the character she’s supposed to be playing.

The science fiction is solid. The melodrama has you wondering how much longer we have to spend with this unbelievable “couple.”

“Battle” is is by turns serio-comic and chilling to the point of depressing.

For an hour or so, director Lurie tackles the tropes lightly as we see lots of football practices, and a few games, and not a lot of anything else. And it plays, helped by the fact that the formidable Masterson doesn’t need a lot of script to get across a flinty “West Texas Gal.”

Alemania is a sweet, understated coming-of-age story, unsurprising in many ways as it borrows its central who-will-stay/who-will-travel story arc from “American Graffiti,” of all films.

Pairing up Margot Robbie and Colin Farrell for a big screen fantasy romance doesn’t pay off in “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey,” a film that has one or two big moments on its road-trip-romantic “journey,” a little digitally augmented “beauty” along the way, but little that measures up to anybody’s idea of “bold.”

It’s a mad, ambitious allegory that dives into the Deal with the Devil one makes for a career in the game.

The tone and atmosphere are immersive and decidedly analog, and the whole nature of “sound” thing makes an interesting metaphysical text or subtext.

Perhaps little more workshopping this script was in order, because the three main characters put on their own three act play in the film’s latter half. Everything that delays packing us in that pressure cooker with them undercuts the most novel version of “a boxing picture” that most of us have ever seen.

The various subplots collide in entertaining ways, and the “payback” chapters are full of surprises, which are easy enough to understand without the tedious business of throwing in anti-climactic flashbacks to ensure everybody “gets” why this or that happened and why any of it makes sense. We got it. We were paying attention.

“A Grand Finale” may not be all that grand, but it more or less checks off the boxes in allowing fans to revel in this world one last time and bid the great house and great cast bon voyage, even if the low-stakes/no-stakes send-off isn’t all it might have been.

A sequel to This is Spinal Tap, the mockumentary that really invented that label, can’t help but play as winded, gassed, joked-out and pointless.

The resolution’s both predictable and perfunctory. “Unsatisfying” comes with the package, and that goes for the movie itself — lazy pop psychology, underdeveloped sociology and psychology and an allegory that never comes close to sticking the landing.

Live-action kid-friendly fare like Grow is a rare thing, these days, especially at the height of Horror Season. Better grab the tykes and dash off to this before the last “pumpkin spice” lattes are served.

Director Sherry Hormann (“A Regular Woman,” “Desert Flower”) and screenwriter Stephanie Sycholt (“Themba”) get the sex and the scenery right. Its the “mystery,” “intrigue” and “thrills” that are the picture’s undoing.

The leads have just enough chemistry to make them credible as a couple.

Washington gives one of his great performances as King, a man comfortable swinging between two worlds with diverging ways of thinking and even talking.

There are few things worse than disguises that don’t amuse, bungled arrests that don’t amount to much more than a forced smile and cricket jokes that, to use a baseball analogy, are never more than “a swing and a miss.”

Wilson and Farmiga still give good value. But this franchise and these fictionalized characters and their Catholic boogeymen claptrap have gone about as far as they can go.

A polished, kid-friendly and even lighthearted Life of Jesus animated film.

It takes the involvement of the FBI and subpoenas and Big Government tech to nail down what IP address in this tiny village was the source of all that turmoil, anguish and mental health mayhem. That isn’t right.

Aronofsky ensures that Butler and his merry band of miscreant castmates make Caught Stealing a frenetic and fun farewell to summer, if a very bloody one.

It’s still nasty fun, just not as nasty and acridly funny as that ’80s comic trio of Turner, Douglas and DeVito were able to make it.

The players are the reason to relish this bon bon, with Kingsley in fine fidget, Brosnan all Irish leftist bluster and Mirren giving a comic edge to a performance that harks back to “Prime Suspect” past.

Restless is a spare, reasonably taut thriller of the “Neighbor from Hell” subgenre, the sort of movie most any member of Western or Eastern Civilization can relate to.

What We Hide is no Winter’s Bone. But this isn’t a bad effort at capturing how the drug crisis impacts its youngest victims. It’s simply an unsurprising one.

It’s about parenting, the job that never ends and the parents who never stop second-guessing how they’re managing it. Beautifully cast, summery and bittersweet with moments of dry wit, “Prayer” is a small scale tragedy in light, deft strokes.

Daniel’s Gotta Die is instantly forgettable.

The laugh-out-loud appearances — not just performing music but “performing” interviews — more than compensate for missing “It used to be about the MUSIC, man.” That makes “Devo” a delight, even if you were never into the band, even if you weren’t in on the joke.

Eden isn’t the subtlest allegory about life in troubled times, but Howard rarely makes a bad film and he hasn’t here. From its eyes-averting grimness to its eye-rolling obviousness and “inevitability, Eden is a parable that plays.

Ahmed, poker-faced start to finish, puts us in this guy’s shoes and in his head when his best laid plans are derailed, his “control” is shattered and his identity endangered. It’s another great character turn by a star who’s gained his leading man status the old fashioned way — by giving one raw, layered and compelling performance at a time.

This remake just breezes by, a comedy more in touch with its tone, more whimsy than wham-bam-thanky-ma’am and the like. It’s less carnal and more romantic.

Breathless, ticking-clock pacing would have stripped the narrative of the many pauses where we’re allowed to think “Oh come ON” before the next stock character makes a bow, the next blow lands or next crooked angle presents itself.

The over-the-top violence is funny in the early scenes. But it turns more and more abrupt, more over-the-top and more sadistic the longer the story unfolds.

Truth be told, the world didn’t need a third “Baby Assassins” movie. All writer-director Yuko Sakamoto did was make a longer, more bloated, more character-cluttered version of the first two films.

The cold-bloodedness of it all suggests a harder-nosed thriller of the “Hell or High Water” school was what Tost had in mind. But he tries to soften that up with sentiment, and the plot and tone never coalesce around that compromise.

War of the Worlds is bad, almost laugh-out-loud bad, and that “almost” is the killer here.

Last Goodbye’s value as an “Around the World with Netflix” taste of another culture is limited.

The film may be commenting on the cushy way the rich and famous coped with Covid. But it’s insufferable at depicting insufferability.

The Pickup never amounts to much more than a take-it-or-leave-it action comedy.

With a striking setting, menacing music scoring gloomy shots of bulls running through swampland in the fog and an up-close look at this unusual variation of bullfighting (it’s barely explained), “Animale” puts us in the mood for a fright even if it’s slow to deliver one.

The script isn’t much and the direction — save for a spirited high school bake sale food fight — is lackluster.

Cregger, like Jordan Peele and Robert Eggers, knows that smart horror is the best horror. And that any horror movie that starts arguments and conversations the moment the credits roll is a winner.

Familiar Touch is a simple, documdrama-real film of frank honesty and sensitivity about dementia and adjusting to life in Memory Care.

Mikael Marcimain’s direction of the action beats is never more than passably exciting. And an honest take on “An Honest Life” might be that everything between those robberies, riots and burglaries just reminds you that there aren’t enough robberies, riots and burglaries to keep one awake through all that tedious voice-over narration.

Kelman’s direction of his script highlights its more arch or even ludicrous/risible elements. The pacing is too sedate to give the narrative urgency and race past the clunkier moments. And the performances aren’t any more subtle than the sometimes absurd action beats.

It’s a reminder of when civility, fair play and principles mattered, of when decent people of influence like Sullivan didn’t think twice about standing up to myopic bigots like Georgia Gov. Herman Talmadge.